After a nine-hour flight from Buenos Aires to Miami en route to Washington, a delegation of Argentine officials planned to meet with Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem to sign an agreement adding Argentina to the Visa Waiver Program (VWP). Noem had already signed a statement of intent to explore Argentina’s membership in the VWP. However, their trip was cut short after the Department of Homeland Security paused those plans due to corruption concerns from other Trump administration officials. Described as a diplomatic “snub,” this event illustrates the larger politics underlying international travel, specifically into the United States.
How the Visa Waiver Program Works
When traveling abroad, U.S. citizens can visit 186 countries without applying for a visa. This ranks the U.S. 12th in the world, tied with Liechtenstein and Malaysia, based on passport power. On the receiving end, through the VWP, the U.S. allows passport holders of only 42 countries to visit for tourism or business without a visa. The program includes the usual list of American allies and partners, such as Australia, France, and the United Kingdom. But it also includes countries of geopolitical importance, such as the recent additions of Israel and Qatar.
The Visa Waiver Program was established in 1986, with its two main goals being “increasing tourism and strengthening national security,” according to the Congressional Research Service. In practice, the VWP makes it easier to visit the U.S. by reducing the paperwork needed to do so and strengthens national security by requiring a digital authorization prior to travel that involves pre-screening travelers through various databases. In 2023, 18.4 million visitors used the program, all pre-screened, to enter the country.
One key criterion that countries must meet to join the VWP is to have a low visa denial rate, defined as under 3 percent. In 2024, Qatar, the most recent country to join the VWP, exceeded this at almost 5 percent. Argentina, which is receiving support from the Trump administration in the process, has an even higher denial rate at nearly 9 percent. However, six countries have rates lower than 3 percent, but are not VWP participants. While there are other criteria beyond just visa refusal rates, these discrepancies illustrate that the VWP is more of a political process than the result of objective rulemaking. As a result, the VWP rebuts policymakers’ original intentions and has morphed into a foreign policy tool where every change is a node in Washington’s geopolitical strategy.
Recent and Aspiring Additions
Despite being a U.S. ally, Israeli travelers could not travel under the VWP until October 2023. This is in part due to Israeli discrimination against Arab Americans, violating the reciprocity criterion. Even though the Biden administration determined that Israel resolved this issue, Arab Americans were not convinced and pointed to the requirement that Americans seek permission to leave Gaza as evidence of Israel receiving special treatment. “The Visa Waiver Program requires that all U.S. citizens are treated equally,” stated U.S. Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Michigan). “I have received consistent reports of discrimination of Americans attempting to enter Israel.” If Israel was not so geopolitically important to the United States’ Middle East policy, it is unlikely that Washington would have given as much leeway to its participation in the VWP.
In a similar vein, Qatar is another Middle Eastern country whose recent VWP entry amounts to geopolitical strategy. Although Americas Quarterly states that “almost every country in the VWP is regarded as a high-income democracy,” Qatar is not. In fact, Freedom House considers the country “not free,” and Amnesty International spotlights its spotty human rights record, especially concerning the rights of migrant workers, including issues such as wage theft and occupational hazards. Despite that, the Biden administration designated Qatar as a VWP participant in September 2024, the first Persian Gulf country to join. In a statement, the White House wrote Qatar “has been an exceptional partner for the United States, and our strategic relationship has only grown stronger over the past few years.” Symbolizing this strategic relationship is the Al Udeid Air Base, the largest U.S. military base in the Middle East. Furthermore, U.S.-Qatari relations have been front and center as the Israel-Hamas conflict continues, with Al Jazeera writing that Qatar has “played an important role alongside the U.S. in trying to broker a cease-fire to end Israel’s war on the Gaza Strip.” This would explain why Qatar, instead of the nearby United Arab Emirates, joined the VWP despite the U.A.E. having a lower visa refusal rate.
But while Israel and Qatar both punched above their weight to join the VWP, the position of Argentina and other would-be eligible countries is more tenuous. For starters, Argentina was formerly part of the program from 1996 to 2002, removed following its 2001 economic crisis. However, the discussions to redesignate Argentina under the VWP are nonetheless political, in support of Argentinian President Javier Milei — whom Trump has referred to as his “favorite president” — and Milei’s electoral fortunes back home amid an economic crisis. In an explicit intervention, the Trump administration proposed a $40 billion bailout package that Trump conditioned on Milei’s party winning the country’s upcoming midterm elections, stating: “if he loses, we are not going to be generous with Argentina.” While implicit, the Visa Waiver Program can further buoy Milei’s government, with Gil Guerra writing in Americas Quarterly that “Argentina re-joining the VWP could boost national pride and optimism after years of economic woes.” But to do so, “the U.S. government [has gone] out of its way to highlight two immigration metrics where Argentina is doing well,” despite the reality that Argentina has a visa denial rate 2.6 times higher than the criterion. With these geopolitical moves, the U.S. is essentially putting its finger on the button of another country’s domestic politics.
Although Argentina is unlikely to qualify for the VWP without the Trump administration’s intervention, neighboring Uruguay is actually eligible on its own merits, despite also having been removed from the program in the past. Uruguay has a visa refusal rate of just 2.63 percent, below the threshold. Regionally, it is one of the least corrupt and most politically stable countries and maintains an equally stable economy. In making the case for Uruguay’s inclusion in the VWP, the Niskanen Center notes it is one of the “few high-functioning democracies not currently in the VWP.” Additionally, there is bipartisan support for change through the United States-Uruguay Economic Partnership Act, which would encourage Uruguay’s participation in the program. But its omission from the VWP illustrates how the Trump administration is set on rewarding countries that are politically aligned with it, such as Milei’s right-wing government. Simply put, the U.S. has not had much geopolitical interest in, nor geopolitical alignment with, Uruguay.
Down the Beaten Path
The recent additions of Israel and Qatar, plus the potential additions of Argentina and Uruguay, provide context for Washington’s current strategy of using the VWP as a geopolitical policy tool. But geopolitics have long been a key consideration for how countries are added to the program.
After the European Union’s largest-ever enlargement of member countries in 2004, a pressure campaign started to add them to the VWP. In a direct appeal, Polish President Aleksander Kwasniewski asked President George W. Bush to remove the visa requirement. And indirectly, these new EU countries could “invoke the EU solidarity clause and the visa reciprocity clause” to pressure Washington to add them to the program by threatening the ability of U.S. citizens to travel to Europe visa-free. And back home, Congress wanted to add countries to the VWP based on the geopolitics of military conflict, if they “provid[ed] material support to the United States or the multilateral forces in Afghanistan or Iraq.” Together, this pressure campaign brought Washington to the negotiating table, and the Bush administration developed road maps with these countries to achieve VWP membership.
But perhaps more relevant was that many of these new EU member states were formerly part of the Soviet Union or aligned with the Eastern Bloc. Similarly, many of these countries were already NATO members or were in the process of joining. Citing Helle Dale, a Hudson Institute panel warns that the risk of not adding these countries to the VWP “fuel[ed] anti-U.S. antagonisms and a perception of capricious discrimination by U.S. bureaucrats […] of people from countries with whom Washington would like to improve commercial and intellectual ties.” As the West strengthened its ties to these countries through the EU and NATO, receiving VWP privileges was seen as a symbolic gesture of partnership.
Ultimately, these efforts were successful in fast-tracking VWP membership. A 2007 law allowed an increase of the visa refusal threshold criterion from 3 percent to 10 percent, adding six countries in 2008. Without that change, these countries would otherwise not have been added to the VWP. Although the U.S. did not make any bureaucratic exceptions for these countries, the process of changing the law was a preference made in response to geopolitics. It was an early, and perhaps most comprehensive, example of how the U.S. can diplomatically use the VWP.
Moving Forward
The European campaign for VWP access and recent additions to the VWP occur on the international stage. But the VWP also has domestic implications. A country’s diaspora can encourage officials to expand the VWP. In 2015, Illinois’ congressional delegation pushed for Poland’s designation, recognizing the Chicago area as having “highest [Polish] concentration of any city outside of Warsaw.” But it can also lead to blowback. The Trump administration’s recent support for Argentina has led to criticism — though mostly centering on the proposed economic aid — from his own party, Democrats, and the public. The White House’s response to these concerns, however, remains unclear.
Simply put, if the VWP were bureaucratic, many countries that participate in the program today would not qualify. As such, Washington’s own criteria to evaluate countries for VWP participation serve more to gatekeep its own interests. If U.S. interests don’t align with a given country, the VWP criteria kick in. But if Washington seeks to reward another, the VWP criteria become flexible to achieve its foreign policy aim. Nonetheless, federal officials still remain accountable to the American public, which serves as a democratic check on the extent to which the VWP is manipulated.
Featured Image Source: The New York Times
